How did we Un-Conferenced at AgilityToday?

What happened at AgilityToday?

Was it really an UnConference?

Did it fit it's VoC as it promised?

.. Let's Un-cover ;)

#1 Free Essential Workshops and Fun Contests to claim passes.

UnConferencing started with a lot of fun in the form of contests, Hackathon, meetups & workshops. They were absolutely free of cost, and led to UnConf passes discounts. Thanks to Atlassian and Microsoft (Deepak and Prtiksha) for supporting us with Logistics. And immense thanks to our AgileVirgin Community worries who created special workshops for induction of Lean, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Distributed Agile, SAFe and some great CI/CD tools. Thank you very much Sumit, Amita, Sonali, Sunil, Vaibhav, Namrata, Shuchi and Pritika.

#2 Essential, Special and Unique (First-Time) courses, at subsidised prices.

Pre and Post UnConference works shops had all essential courses like CSM, CSPO, Kanban Essentials, PSM, PSPO, as well as Special courses like LeSS, SPC and Testing Automation, and then there are some very first time courses as well like XSCALE, Certified Distributed Agile. Thanks to our Sponsors and Knowledge & Logistic Partners Siraj Sirajuddin, Madhur Kathuria, Arshiya Sultana, Pritika Gulliani, Naveen Kumar Singh, Rajiv Kathuria, Ashish Mishra, Deepak and Prtiksha that we could make these available to our Partners.

#3. Open Houses, with special facilitation to ensure participation from all.

This movie is not about one Hero, it's about all of us, so lets act together

Keynote is a huge responsibility, and mostly badly executed. Mostly Conferences have them either to please Sponsors or just to meet the condition. At AgilityToday, we believe that this movie is not about one Hero/Heroine, who steals the show, who can only be seen from far, and only a handful of people can interact with them. It was an intentional move, required to install confidence in every participant that they are nothing less, and as Agile and Scrum say, we are all equal. So we did not do Keynote but an Up-close and Open Conversation between Professionals and Leaders of IT/Software & Agile Industry. Purpose was not just to create a great conversation, but was of Co-creation of a culture by both the parties - Leaders and executors, where you get your answers from Leaders and Experts and they share their problems with you and seek your inputs to solve it. So, on both the days, AgilityToday had two OPEN HOUSES - 'Into your shoes' & 'Seek from Gurus'. First Open House ideated and facilitated by Siraj Sirajuddin where Professionals and Leaders exchange concerns, challenges and try to address them together. Both parties got to get into each other's shoes so that they can understand each other better, and co-create Agile Culture. Second Open House was to seek from Agile Leaders on Coaching and Consulting related challenges.

#4 Map Professionals with Opportunities, Growth and Gyaan they need.

Tell me very honestly why do you attend any Conference? For opportunities - Networking, Self-learning, finding out right course, direction and mentor, needed support and guidance, a platform to make yourself visible, and get yourself heard. With the cooperation of Agile and industrial Leaders, both the days allowed 1:1 between Professionals and Leaders, to discuss Career Opportunities and Profile improvement. All Participants booked a slot with their Leader of choice via Pingala's App MyRappo, and discussed about work related challenges, sought opportunities and also asked about what can be done to further upgrade themselves to fit future and changing job market needs. Leaders like Vikram Kapoor, Ankita Mathur, Namrata Datta and Siraj Sirajuddin openly announced opportunities.

#5 Only Speak from your Experience that we can use in real life.

Sessions were only Authentic Experience Reports, Case Studies and Hands on Workshop. There was a clear and loud message in VoC that only talk talk talk makes people sleep.

So we crowd sourced only those proposals which met the criteria. We are thankful to our wonderful speakers who respected that. If I have to confess, we have support and blessing of everyone, every Agile Space Leader and we really can't thank them enough. Thank you very much!

#6 Unwinding with Drumming and Painting

Yes this UnConference was very much fun and we Unwound with Drumming and Dancing on Day-1. Thanks to my friend Joy and his Delhi Drummers who created this magic for us. All 200 people dancing and playing same rhythm. Day-2 was even more special,

thanks to Siraj Sirajuddin and Silvana Wasitova for creating a beautiful Open Space, an UnConferencing and Unwinding Space for us, a Temenos where everyone painted their Vision. I have to tell you that after closing note we have to tell people to leave, they were mesmerised and happy and could not believe that AgilityToday for 2018 was over, and they said that they can't wait for next. For those of you, we have some more announcements, the surprises that you will relish and enjoy!

#7 How to sustain the wave, what next?

With AgilityToday, we have been able to hit a milestone for all our efforts that we have started as AgileVirgin Community, and we have hundreds of query on how more people can be part of this initiative from all over the India, and many leaders from all over the world offered genuine help for future initiatives. So, we decided to dare some more, and create self managing teams of Volunteers and fuel our other initiatives.

A Culture is not build over a weekend in an UnConference. It is built Daily by living it!

Please join our hands, here is list of our upcoming initiatives, let's make it bigger and better than AgilityToday:

1. Agile-A-Thon: Are you ready for the fastest and longest run of knowledge and Agility? This contest will run for 8 weeks and will end with awesome prizes, of course along with amazing learning. If interested, read Agile-A-Thon Blog or check Website. Initial collaboration happens here, which will be moved to slack: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IPi2K6mwY382BGfMWSeOxL
2. The Consultant: This is an iterative learning program to prepare Pragmatic Coaches and Consultants, who can be the right 'Consultant' to their Org or that of their client's and bring out real transformation in their Organisations or at Client's. This Program will be a package of In Person Workshops, Online sessions and 1:1 consultation by Indian as well as International Coaches and Consultants.
3. The Consultants Summit: A very special 2 days program for present and future Agile Consultants (internal or external to any Organisation), to understand challenges faced by consultants and to create an Eco-system of constant learning, support and growth.
4. The Atlassians Unofficial: A workshop based, learning program for Atlassian and similar tools that can help with CI/CD, DevOps and Agile enablement. If interested, please join our meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Atlassian-User-Group-Delhi-Gurugram-NCR
5. The FunConf: What do you think about Agile Games? Do you think you have games that can imbibe learning and transform the team, org, mindset and culture? Can you think of games that will touch, move and inspire leadership? Can you think of games that will help engineers learn TDD, BDD, mob-programming? This UnConf focuses on that. Interested? Stay tuned :)
6. Women In Agile UnConf: One day UnConf only and only for Women to talk, learn, network and share. The Outcome of this UnConf will be to design a path for participants that they crave for most, which includes helping them with right job, work-life balance, relationships, leadership and all that which mostly they don't realise or can't achieve due to mindset and social structure.
7. Data Science and Machine Learning: With the help of Varun Jain, Thinkerslab and Microsoft, we are designing new programs for AI, ML and DS. If interested, join our meetup: https://www.meetup.com/DataScience-ML
8. DevOps: Thanks to Microsoft, Pingala and OpsTree, we will be able to run our DevOps initiatives. If interested, join our meetup: https://www.meetup.com/agilevirgin
9. AgileHR: This year we are also focusing on AgileHR, and our two domain experts, one a full time employee - Monika Marwah and another consultant - Parul Khandelwal. Join them in their journey with AgileVirgin and discover role of HR in Org and Business Agility, and learn how they themselves can be truly Agile. Interested? Join Agile HR Whatsapp group and stay updated with all latest developments.
10. Agile Sales and Marketing: How can you expect to achieve Business Agility if your business engines - it's Sales & Marketing work in their own world and rest of the business enabling units in another. This year we are also focusing on Agile Sales and Marketing with our domain expert Mansi Mansharmani, who had played a pivotal role in Indian Agile Industry and herself has been an Agilist at heart.
11. AgilityToday: Of course we will start prep of 2019 UnConf :). Check AgilityToday site for an idea and subscribe for updates.

Thanks for you patience, with the long blog. I am sure you would want to know about people who made this UnConf possible, and may be you too can seek help from them and create your own solution in the form of an event of your choice. Read about it here.

Regards and Metta,

Deepti ([email protected])